The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Another great show today going to be awesome. And I’ll tell you what, I am excited to catch up with my old friend John Schlafly. John Schlafly will give us an update on his column.
And we have a new guest. Buddy Ullman is a retired professor up in Oregon and he has a perspective on Title IX. Title IX is the law that was passed in the 1970s that said do not discriminate against women based on gender. And it went so far in the 1990s that basically anyone who said any woman who said you might have treated me wrong discriminated against me. There were investigations, so called Title IX investigations against everybody under the sun, really became abused and became a tool of the left. Well, Dr. Buddy Ullman, this professor also has a perspective. Now, you can actually be the subject of a Title IX investigation because it’s about gender. And gender has become not biological sex, but whatever you want it to be. And so we’re going to see he told me that there’s, off the air, we’re talking about pronouns, use the wrong pronoun. You may have caused a heartache and caused someone pain. You may be charged under Title IX. So there you have it. Amazing. All right. So we’ll talk with him.
But what you need to know today does have to do with schools. You’re watching the government, crony, crony government at its best.
Joe Biden announced that he is canceling 6 billion with A-B-6 billion dollars’ worth of student loan debt from a bunch of students. Almost a half a million, I think more than a half a million students who incurred the debt to study at something called Corinthian College. Corinthian College was a for profit College. It was one of these relatively shadowy things where they took your money and you were supposed to study and get a degree. It turns out Kamala Harris, then the attorney general of California, sued Corinthian College and said you’re not delivering what you said you would. I wish she’d sue every public school from here to Berkeley and back and have the same conversation.
And Corinthian College went out of business. And so here we go.
Think about what’s wrong in America when the President of the United States and his Vice President, who have basically had a pre-existing history of having addressed this issue, are now touting it even further by forgiveness of billions of dollars of loans. Almost $6 billion, I think if you calculate it the way I saw it calculated, but certainly over $5 billion of loans will be forgiven. Just almost up to 6 billion. Excuse me, I see the number now, $6 billion. So here’s the thing that’s ridiculous about this.
If you didn’t go to college, your taxes are paying to pay someone else’s loans. If you did go to college, but you didn’t go to college at Corinthian, your loans aren’t forgiven. If you went to college and you took loans and you paid them all off already. Your loans don’t matter. So this is the classic example, not just of taking from one and giving to the other, but in this case, it’s crony government.
It’s cronyism. And it’s done by Kamala Harris, to try to underscore that she’s right. And look, I don’t know anything about Corinthian College. I don’t know anything about some of these for profit things. But I do know when adults make decisions about loans and about these kinds of things, there ought to be some consequences, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I do think that there are people that are predatory lending, there are people taking advantage. But we’re living in a consumer culture right now where people just think they can buy it and they never will matter.
I’ll tell you a quick story.Years ago now, probably 25 years ago, I had an idea on a project. The project was to go and interview people who were 75 years and older. That was a date in my head that sounded like old timers. And I call this actual lives. And I would go to see regular people, couldn’t be famous. And I go to see regular people and ask them what their life was like. And they always had great stories.
One of the women I met was in her nineties. And I said it was about 1998 and she was in her nineties, so she was like 93 or four. So she lived from before. I think she was born in 1903 or 1904. And she could remember the first airplane, the first telephone, Model T, jet planes, two world wars. She remembered and she was amazing. And I said, what’s the most astounding thing that you’ve seen over these many years of your life? What is it that is the most important change? We even had cell phones back then, I think. But the telephone, I said, was it or TV? What was it?
And she said one thing, the thing that transformed life was credit cards.
She said, because before credit cards, she said, I remember we would get something and if there was something that we wanted, sometimes we’d stretch. And so at one point her mother, I think, bought a TV and she was maybe a teenager and the mother bought a TV or maybe a radio, could have been a radio. And she said every week for about six weeks we would go and visit the radio. I think it was a radio now that I’m saying it. And mom would pay a little bit more of it off and we would visit it because we bought it on layaway. You bought that and you said, I will eventually pay it off.
And when you paid it off, you took it home.
And this woman said to me, what flipped was that people had credit cards and you didn’t actually understand the cost. This is my word. She didn’t say this phrase, but you didn’t delay gratification. You didn’t appreciate the amount of work it took to get the $50 together to pay for the radio because you just took it home and eventually they sent you a bill. And it is true.
That’s a dramatic change, by the way. It’s not a bad change. It’s a change. Credit, like insurance, is one of the great things that makes us be able to take chances and take risks. And it’s one of the reasons why the rule of law is so important, because in America, you could get credit and rely on it because you knew our system was honorable, that people that took a loan would pay it. And if they didn’t pay it and they were really stuck, there’d be a way out, bankruptcy, but there would in other places. Banana republics, you just take whatever money you want. You lie about it. You never care.
In America, we had the rule of law that enforce the exchange, you need something, you pay forit and it gives you a benefit. The person gets the cash or gets the credit or whatever. However you describe it. And the system worked.
Not when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or anybody else, by the way, it happens to Republicans, Republicans do it too. It happens at state levels, local levels, to decide who to reward and who not to reward because there’s two problems with it. One, the system starts to give because people think, well, the game is rigged. I’m not going to bother. I’d rather just take a regular job with the state or the federal government or somebody just because I don’t know anybody. I wasn’t born with the connections. I’m just not going to bother. That’s one problem. It changes the whole incentive system.
The second problem is once you keep increasing the size and scope of government, it just becomes a complete racket, a boondoggle at this point. I mean, think about how much money we’re talking about, $6 billion. Building the wall. I think at one point the price to build the wall on the border was 8 billion.
We’re forgiving $6 billion in debt.
We’re not forgiving, by the way, debts. We’re paying them off. That’s what’s happening. The federal government is paying them off because that money doesn’t disappear. The money, it exists, it goes out to somebody, went to Corinthian College, it’s owed to somebody. The interest is owed to somebody, it gets paid off. That’s how this works.
So the system that we live in requires, I know it sounds like I say this a lot. I talk about the systems, the American system. I talked about the election system the other day. In this case, the system that we live in is that we have to have people rely on the legal system of commerce.We have to have people believe in the accountability of that process or people start to have no sense of the value of money and that was that old lady’s point. Once they flip to credit cards, away from layaway, everything changed, she said. The way people relate to value changed dramatically.
And once you have a president and others, again, both parties a lot of times will do it. Not Republicans mostly won’t go for it, but some of them do that say, oh well, take loans, benefit from the loans, go to the school, use the money for food, use the money for rent, use the money for a car which is all that stuff. Money’s fungible. So when you get a loan for $10,000 to school and you’re also worried and when you’re done according to the government, Joe Biden and everybody else, don’t worry about paying it back.
It will be taken care of. The message is horrendous and it’s demeaning. It’s demeaning to the people who had their loans forgiven because nobody wants to be the vassal of somebody else which is what that makes you. But it’s demeaning to the people who work and pay the loans. It’s demeaning the people that believe in the system. It’s once again a terrible example. But if you have the power and you use it for crony capitalism or crony government, it’s kind of like drugs. I think it’s addictive. The power is addictive. And here we have Kamala Harris. When she was in the attorney general of California she started this racket and now she’s continuing as vice President and Joe Biden is going along. Terrible stuff.
All right, we’ll take a break. When we come back, we will take a visit with our new guest, John Schlafly. First John Schlafly has got another column and then we will talk with Buddy Ullman, Dr. Buddy Ullman about Title IX.
We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
